About Jeffrey Deitch

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Jeffrey Deitch being thrown into the Pacific Ocean by Martin Kersels
Photo by Jason Schmidt

Jeffrey Deitch has been involved with modern and contemporary art for nearly fifty years as an artist, writer, curator, dealer, and advisor. He opened his first gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts near Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in 1972. During the final week of the gallery’s summer season, a New York artist who had been a regular visitor sat down with Deitch and told him that even though he had some aptitude for the field, he needed an art education. Deitch has been working on his art education ever since.

Deitch drove down to SoHo the day after his graduation from Wesleyan University in June, 1974 and walked up the stairs to the Leo Castelli Gallery to ask for a job. The Brundage sisters, who later became friends, were sitting behind the reception desk and hardly acknowledged his presence. They implied that there would probably never be a job opening. The door to the Sonnabend Gallery on the next floor was locked because in those days Ileana would close the gallery and spend the entire summer in Venice. Deitch walked up the next flight to the John Weber Gallery, where it turned out that the secretary had just quit while John Weber was away at the Basel Art Fair. The Director was there all by herself and needed some help but she told him that John Weber only liked to hire pretty girls and that there was no way that John would agree to hire a young man for the secretary’s job. Deitch offered a proposition: he would be happy to work for free for a week and if he did a good job, the Director might consider recommending him to John Weber when he returned. The Director thought about it for a while, looking at the empty desk with the typewriter. She accepted Deitch’s proposition and immediately put him to work taking dictation. The following Monday, John Weber returned, saw Deitch sitting at the secretary’s desk, and stormed into the Director’s office in a rage, slamming the door. After about five minutes of shouting, the Director emerged, announcing, “you’re hired.”

Deitch had the good fortune to have walked into one of the most important galleries of new art in the world. The John Weber Gallery represented Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Hans Haacke and some of the leading Arte Povera artists like Alighiero Boetti and Mario Merz. The artists used the gallery office as a clubhouse. Carl Andre would come in every afternoon at 3 PM when he was in New York to pick up his mail and his messages. Most afternoons there were important artists and curators waiting to meet with him, and it was part of Deitch’s job to entertain them. Deitch had moved to New York without knowing a single person. Within six months, thanks to his job at the epicenter of the art discourse, he had met close to half of the art world. Listening to the gallery artists challenge each other while they sat around the office was an extraordinary education. Sol LeWitt was rigorous and exacting in his opinions about art, but was an exceptionally generous teacher. LeWitt became a life long inspiration.

Deitch began finding it increasingly difficult to get to his desk by 10 AM each morning as he became more deeply involved in the community around the new bands like the Ramones, Suicide, and Television who played late into the night at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. He negotiated a new arrangement with John Weber to write the gallery newsletter, which allowed him to keep his own hours and stay out as late as he wanted. He began working on an exhibition that focused on artists who used their own lives as an art medium. Lives, which was presented in 1975 in an abandoned office building in TriBeCa, was Deitch’s first curatorial project. In many of his subsequent exhibitions and in his program at Deitch Projects, he has continued to explore this theme.

Deitch surprised his art world friends in the fall of 1976 by enrolling at the Harvard Business School, announcing that he was going there to study art criticism. His experience there inspired a new approach to art writing, a fusion of aesthetic and economic analysis. A thesis project was expanded into a College Art Association talk on Andy Warhol as a Business Artist that was later published in Art in America. After receiving his MBA from Harvard with Second Year Honors in 1978, he remained in the Boston area for a year, becoming Curator at the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, MA.

Deitch returned to New York in 1979 to develop and co-manage Citbank’s Art Advisory Service. It was the first professional art advisory service of its type and the first department in a major bank to specialize in art finance. Deitch advised important clients of the bank on their art collections and structured loans against art. After nine years at Citibank, where he became a Vice President, he opened his own art advisory firm in 1988. Deitch continues to advise some of the world’s most active collectors of modern and contemporary art. As art advisor to the I Club in Hong Kong, he brought Andy Warhol to China in 1982. For more than ten years, he had a partnership with Itochu Corporation to advise Japanese public museums and corporate collections on the acquisition of modern and contemporary art.

Deitch has been active as an art writer since the mid 1970s. He received an Art Critic’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979 and in the 1970s and early 1980s was a regular contributor to Arts and Art in America. His 1980 essay for Art in America on the Times Square Show was the most extensive first hand account of this seminal event. Deitch also served as the first American Editor of Flash Art. He has written numerous catalogue essays including texts on Keith Haring for the Musée de l’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Whitney Museum, and most recently on Jeff Koons for the Whitney. His essay The Art Industry, which analyzed the new art economy, was included in the catalogue for Metropolis at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin in 1991.

Deitch’s own art involved constructing situations where the form of the work created itself. In 1976, he instigated arguments on busy New York street corners and photographed the movements of the crowds. A series from 1977 re-created the end of the aisle supermarket displays of cereal boxes and other consumer goods that were stacked by stock boys. A work from this series was shown at White Columns in 2007.

Deitch began curating an influential series of exhibitions for the Deste Foundation in Athens, starting with Cultural Geometry in 1988. Other Deste exhibitions include Artificial Nature in 1990, Everything That’s Interesting is New in 1996, and Fractured Figure in 2007. He was a member of the curatorial team for the foundation’s Monument to Now exhibition in 2004. Each exhibition was accompanied by a book or catalogue that mixed image and text in an innovative format. In the early 1990s, Deitch curated several exhibitions in Tokyo, including Strange Abstraction in 1991 with Robert Gober, Cady Noland, Philip Taaffe and Christopher Wool for the Touko Museum.

Deitch’s best know exhibition in the early 1990s was Post Human, which opened at the FAE, Musée d’ Art Contemporain in Lausanne in June 1992 and traveled to the Castello di Rivoli in Torino, the Deste Foundation in Athens, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He also curated one of the sections of Aperto at the Venice Biennale in 1993. In 2001, he curated Form Follows Fiction at the Castello di Rivoli in Torino.

Deitch has authored several monographic works and has published more than fifty essays on artists ranging from Fernand Leger to Swoon. He was co-author of Keith Haring, published by Rizzoli in 2008, and British Rubbish: Tim Noble and Sue Webster, published by Rizzoli in 2011. He wrote the introduction to Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981: The Studio of the Street, published by Charta in 2007. He has written extensively on artists who have emerged from street and graffiti culture.

Deitch has been especially engaged with the careers of three of his artist contemporaries, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons, since 1980. Deitch was the first writer to review the work of Basquiat and had the sad task of delivering the eulogy at his funeral. He served for many years on the Authentication Committee of the Basquiat Estate. Deitch wrote one of the essays for the first publication on the work of Keith Haring in 1982 and continues to write about his art. He was the exclusive commercial representative of the Estate of Keith Haring from 1998 – 2010. In addition to his writings and exhibition projects with Jeff Koons, Deitch helped to introduce Koons’s work to several of his most important patrons and helped them to build their collections of his work. Deitch was Koons’s American dealer during most of the 1990s and co-produced the artist’s ambitious Celebration series.

Deitch Projects, the New York gallery that Deitch operated from 1996-2010 presented more than two hundred-fifty projects by artists from thirty-three countries. It was a unique organization, more like a private Institute of Contemporary Art than a commercial gallery. In addition to its gallery exhibitions, Deitch Projects was known for its performance program and public events like the Art Parade. The gallery’s program is documented in Live the Art, Fifteen Years of Deitch Projects, published by Rizzoli in 2014.

Deitch closed the gallery to become Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. During his three years at MOCA, he presented fifty exhibitions and projects including The Painting Factory and Art in the Streets, which had the highest attendance in the museum’s history. Deitch also initiated the first museum YouTube channel, MOCAtv.

Deitch has now reestablished his art advisory office and exhibition program in New York and will be opening a Los Angeles gallery in September 2018.

Image Caption: Jeffrey Deitch being thrown into the Pacific Ocean by Martin Kersels